Netball World Cup Measurement Report

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A look at how the Vitality Netball World Cup 2019 performed in terms of media coverage - traditional and social - for itself and its sponsors.

It was a particularly crowded sporting summer.

Cricket, women’s football and netball all held World Cups, joining annual events such as Wimbledon, The Open, The British Grand Prix and the Tour de France.

So, how did the Vitality Netball World Cup manage to cut-through?

Share of voice

The sport is on the crest of a wave here following England’s dramatic gold-medal win at last year’s Commonwealth Games so a home World Cup was a great opportunity to build on this interest, particularly with BBC sharing broadcast rights with Sky.

Between the 23rd June and the 22nd July, the tournament managed to generate nearly 20,000 media articles globally across more than 1,000 publications in 61 countries, which is impressive. Although the crowded sporting calendar meant that in terms of UK articles, it only garnered around 5% share among the seven events mentioned.

Nearly 60% of the mentions occurred on broadcast media, followed by 36% in online articles – making the tournament less reliant on broadcast than the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup (68%) but more so than, say, Wimbledon (46%).

Title mentions

As the ingrained title sponsor, Vitality was cited in 13% of articles mentioning the tournament. Their citations were most likely to happen in online articles (35% of the time) compared to 12% in print articles and just 0.1% in broadcast mentions.

This obviously represents a huge loss in potential media value for a sponsor and the Netball World Cup is certainly not alone in facing this issue. It points to the question of whether rights holders in general have to work harder in encouraging broadcasters to refer to the full tournament name including title sponsor more (or at least some of) the time?

Overall, 89% of Vitality citations occurred in online articles.

Interestingly, M&S Bank (who have the naming rights to the Arena in which the tournament took place) achieved half the number of mentions as Vitality during the analysis period, despite not being an event sponsor, highlighting the long-term benefit and ‘media bleed’ of stadium naming rights.

Social Skills

As with many other tournaments, Instagram provided the lion’s share of social media engagements for the tournament’s official social media channels (60%), compared to 25% via Facebook and 15% via Twitter. In comparison, Instagram accounted for 67% for Wimbledon and 37% for the Women’s Football World Cup.

Around 40% of the tournament’s Instagram posts achieved an engagement rate above 5% (5% considered high for Instagram) compared to 17% of posts exceeding a 1% engagement rate on Facebook but just 4% on Twitter (1% considered high for these channels).

Vitality’s social media activity rose dramatically. When comparing the time period before and during the World Cup – every metric analysed saw a positive percentage increase. Total social engagements, engagement rate, Instagram engagements improved by over 100%. Instagram rates almost tripled.

Last year, Vitality extended its sponsorship of Netball England for another three years with the core purpose of growing interest and raising the profile of the sport and its players. The numbers suggest that, as partners, they’ve established a good base on which to build.